Meta Tag Attributes: What They Are and What You Should Know

The meta tags are there to help search engines and readers understand the page and its content. Think of them like the index of a book. Google sees the tags and gets an overview.

Here are the meta tags from most to least important:

Meta Robots

Title Tag

Meta Description

Meta Keywords

… and why they’re ranked this way:

Meta Robots

The meta robots tag is #1 because you’re either telling Google:

Index this page

Don’t index this page

Suppose you accidentally chose or coded noindex on the page… well, Google sees it but won’t place it in search engine results. This attribute is usually left for backend pages like logins or accounts. It has a purpose, but you wouldn’t want to apply it to your main content.

There’s also:

Follow

Nofollow

The follow attribute tells Google to pass “weight” to the next page while nofollow says “hey, don’t pay attention to the pages I’m linking”. You’d want to ensure your main content has follow attributes while the personal pages (again, login, account, ETC) don’t.

Title Tag

The right title can improve your click through in the range of 20% to 730%. This high click-through rate is a major signal for Google’s RankBrain.

Better RankBrain = better search rankings.

So… make sure every page has a unique, optimized title.

Meta Description

The description comes in at a close second for two reasons:

Houses keyword(s)

Gives a user a reason to click

Some like to judge a book by its cover. Others will read the back. The description is a preview of what they can expect. You should always have unique descriptions for each page.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords fell out of favor when people kept abusing them. Honestly, you probably can avoid these completely. But, it takes a few seconds to include them so why not? Use the main and secondary keywords related to the content in this area.

Meta Tags for SEO: Refining the Meta Keywords Google Loves

Meta tags are easy to neglect because you simply forget since you’re excited to hit publish. Likewise, some webmasters don’t want to touch the code in fear or breaking the site. Or, they don’t know HTML.

Those aren’t good excuses.

It takes you what… a minute or two to include them?

Here’s what you should do…

1. Select the meta keyword based on the content topic

Your keyword selection will mirror what you’ve chosen as the main topic of the content.

For example, we chose ‘Meta Tags’ which if you were to do a CTRL + F to find all instances you’ll notice quite a few peppered throughout the post.

So… we’ll use that in our title, description, and tags.

2. Work on creating a title and keep rewriting it until you get the one that’s great